Kim Robinson - Red Mars

That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.

Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.

That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.

Can we? Can we?

You just wait and see.

He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower— already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.

After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said, “She loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.

She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.

Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself— was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love.. . The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet. . that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?

Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.

In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superseded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation-capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks, and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts. Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.

Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station. The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the northeast. This scoop formed a great gap across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways explosion. But that was the only flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flat. And sixty kilometers across, and a full 5,000 meters deep. Like the start of the mohole to end all moholes. The few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant’s scale, almost invisible from the rim.

The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevator. The attachment point was obvious; it was a massive tan-and-white concrete blockhouse, located a few kilometers east of the big tent town around the train station. Running east along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum black. There were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.

The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base. Apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that afternoon. This turned out to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheless. The end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, and this rocket’s eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurts. The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor and observing a fishing line, dropped down among them from the plum sea surface— a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottom wreck. His blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathe deep. Very peculiar.

They toured the base complex. The gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring of a rim. The walls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a shock-cushioning collar. The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, 37,000 kilometers in all. And only ten meters across.

With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily, but not rapidly, as it had to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic approach. “It’s going to be like Zeno’s paradox,” Slusinski said.

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.